Nāmic
Nāmic is an Indo-European influenced, mixed a priori-posteriori language, by Waahlis. Formely known as Nāmaς, until wikicode drove it to extinction. __TOC__ Introduction Dēna vēȷyans! ''- Welcome!'' This page uses IPA phonetic notation as standard. This page uses non - standard ASCII signs. Nāmic, (ˈnɑːm.ık, translates as "name, noun, meaning or thing"), or Naṃkrthāvāka 'ˌnã.kr̩ˑ.ˈtʰaː.faː.xa "Named constructed speech" - is a mixed constructed ''a priori/ a posteriori language. It draws inspiration from mainly the Indo-European branch, yet makes a decisive stance to preserve artificial features. For the sake of simplicity I suppose it could be called the Namian language, or whatever. Doesn't really matter. Namas.png Fusional.png Transitive.png Direction.png Genders.png Declension.png Conjugation.png Since there is a tendency in Nāmic to blend characteristics of both artificial and natural languages, a rather unholy mixture has arisen, for example: It is a fusional language, like its predecessors Latin, Sanskrit, Greek and Germanic - yet displays the highly unnatural ergative-accusativ alignment, or tripartite, - which is rarely seen outside conlanging. Concerning the vocabulary, both words derived from Indo-European stems, as well as complete a priori ''words, appear; such as "''dhrȳa" - tree, from Indo-European *dóru, and the word for heaven'', "ıāmna"'' - from... me. Other than that, other, rather unique features are included, such as: *Phonemic and manipulated stress. *Progressive metaphony. *Partial regressive metaphony. *Consonant harmony, based upon voicedness. Plus an extremely constructed characteristic: *Distinguished transitivity Phonology Consonants Phonology The following table portraits Nāmic's phonetic inventory of consonants. All consonants, except aspirated ones, may be geminated, which is phonemic, and represented by doubling by the grapheme. The letter /h/ represents aspiration when succeding consonants, and breathy-voice when preceding vowels. "Nh", is an exception, being a velar nasal. Please note that all retroflex consonants and the dental trill rhoticise the surrounding consonants. The pronunciation of is considered dialectal. Alphabet Hence the alphabet of Nāmic: Please note that the letters /h/ and /ṃ/ are modifiers of adjacent vowels. See the Vowel Quality section. The letter /ς/ is a possible alternativeto lexeme-final /s/. Lenition In addition to the consonants above, Nāmaς suffers from severe allophony, '''lenition, caused when: *Consonants lie in medial position between two vowels. *Consonants lie in final position in lexemes. The aspirated consonants become completely spirantisised, whilst the unaspirated phonemes become affricates. The exceptions are the velars, which all become fricatives. The nasal consonants, affricates, trills and approximants remain unaffected. Please note that the phonemes without brackets are the "basic" consonants. Nota bene There is additional allophony, regarding phonation. The pairs - ɟ, -ʝ, - f, and - ʍ, are only represented by one grapheme each: ȷ, hy, v, and vh respectively. Their voiced counterpart is an allophone - see Consonant Assimilation. The murmur-phonation letter /h/ receives the pronunciation ç/x when final in a syllable. Thus, our conclusion is that the word vāka- voice, speach - shouldn't be pronounced ˈwaːka, but rather ˈʍaːxa. Affricates In addition to these, there's a multitude of digraphs with corresponding affricates. It is important to note that the four digraphs /pt/, /vt/, /kt/, and /jt/ symbolise consonant clusters with an affricate onset. They are not affected by lenition. Consonant Assimilation Nāmic possesses a progressive consonant assimilation word-internally, based upon phonation, or voicedness. The consequence is that a consonant, a cluster, or an affricate, is pronounced differently, depending on whether it is preceded by a voiced or voiceless consonant. There are exceptions to this rule, since the alveolar trill r and the retroflex tap ɽ do not differ between voicedness. The nasal stops are affected quite differently, with a complete nasalisation of the preceding vowel - and loss of the stop - if the initial or first consonant is voiced. However, nasals are perceived as neutral in nature, and does therefore not affect voiceless nor voiced phonemes. There are, however, two dialects of Nāmic; *Staṇya, which means "current, dominating". *Ḷestra, which means "golden, posh". The Staṇya dialect will be featured in this article, and is the main dialect that distinguishes consonant assimilaton upon voicedness. Vowels The representation of Nāmic's vowels. There are are fifteen vowel phonemes, yet only 7 graphemes, thus, it may be assumed some are allophones during certain circumstances. It is obvious that many of the vowel graphemes are recycled, since many phonemes are allophones. The background is covered in the Metaphony section. Diphthongs There are a limited number of diphthongs in Nāmaς, with the same amount rising as falling diphthongs. ɪ̯ is most often equivalent to j, and u̯ is often just w. The left diftong is its front value, and the right one is the back value. All other vowel clusters are diaeresis. The main phoneme in all diphthongs may be geminated. Diphthong Allophony No falling diphthongs occur inter consonants, as a nucleus, nor do the falling diphthongs appear geminated in open coda position. They are transformed into geminated, or short monophthongs - and are inconsistently written as monophthongs, however it isn't compulsory. The allophony according to this schedule: Front diphthongs on the left, back ones at the right. Vowel Metaphony The Naṃkrthāvāka suffers from a certain kind of vowel harmony, called progressive vowel metaphony. This urges all vowel phonemes in a lexeme to be of the same kind of the preceding one. That is: Va = type-a vowel, Vb = type-b vowel, C = consonant: VaVbVb > VaVaVa There are tqo exception, causing the metaphony to be regressive instead; when a word is initialised by an ɛ, or an ә. The ɛ and ә the gets assimilated by the succeeding consonant: VbVaVb > VaVaVa These modified ɛ-ә -sounds will occurr later in text, and will be referred to as "affected" /ɛ-ә/. The metaphony is present, and affect for example the plural endings of many case declensions, where the coda vowel gets completely assimilated by the former. However, if the preceding vowel has the same front-back value, it's just diphthongised. *Horse -'' thētosya'' (abs. sing.) > thētosyoı (abs. plu.) *But not; "fire" - kēma (erg. sing.) ''> *kēmeı, but rather ''kēmaı (erg. plu.) Nāmic's metaphony is based upon backness, with eceptions being when /e/, /y/ and /o/ are followed by an r, which ignores the harmony, and modifies the phoneme. Vowel Quality There are no less than six different vowel qualities: *Short and geminated Oral *Short and geminated Nasal *Short and geminated Murmured The vowels will be represented by a default /a/. Please note that any nasal can nasalise the preceding vowel, however in non-voiced environments, only the letter "ṃ" may. Nota Bene When /h + vowel/ is preceded by a vowel, a glottal stop is inserted. Other Some phonemes develop new pronunciations when adjacent to eachother: *h + r = xr *s + r = ʂr *s + u + vowel = su̯V *s + u + ı = sʍı Phonotactics *Any consonant - C *Sonorant - S *Fricative - F *Nasal - N *Vowel, also diphthong when final - V A Namian syllable have two different maximal syllabic structures, the by far most common structure is (F)©©V©(F/N) initially, and (F)©CV©(F/N) medially and finally. The conclusion is that a syllable's maximal consonant cluster is FCC, that a medial and final syllable minimally must look like CV, and that all syllables must terminate in either a F, fricative, a nasal- N, or a vowel - V. Since most lexemes in Nāmaς are disyllabic, a common lexeme might look like this: FCVN.CV, like stānta - "state" ˈstaːn.ta. It should herefore be noted that ēkva - either, is pronounced ˈɛː.kʍa, and not ˈɛːk.ʍa. The second structure is very uncommon, but does occur: ©CS©, and sometimes ©CVS©, where a sonorant occupy the syllable nucleus. Most of the syllables are free, that is, without the coda. Examples include vṙkas - wolf ˈʍr̩ˑ.kas, and ēktrva - any of them ˈɛː.ktr̩ˑ.ʍa. Interestingly, all syllabic sonorants are half-geminated. Grammar Stress {C}A pecurious detail of Nāmic is that it is possible to manipulate the stress to convey different meanings. In Nāmic {C}linguistics called stress apophony. There are four diacritics in Nāmaς: {C}The acute accent, "ó", or the dot "ȯ" which marks stress on a short syllable. This is only used on open monosyllables, since they are long otherwise. {C}The grave accent "ò" which may be used to replace the macron "ō". These indicate geminated stress. Stress must always be marked in polysyllabic words, except verbs in the infinitive, and gemination must be marked in all words. In many of the pro-adverbs, a question may be abbreviated from "Shall I put it here?" Vērem dās sdıses hyāra? daːz ˈstis.ɛs ˈçɛː.ra into "Here?" in English and "Hyarā?", not "Hyāra?" in Namian. By moving the stress to the ultimate syllable in adverbs and nouns, you may produce an interrogative meaning. {C}Concerning nouns in the nominative case, all stress is irregular, and a multitude of minimal pairs exist: such as "burden" nāutoς ˈnœːθ.œs, and "meaning" nautōς nœˈθ.œːs. Only in certain cases is the stress moved from one syllable to another - "snake" nāga ˈnaː.ɣa, in the nominative, becomes in the genitive; naganēς na.ɣa.ˈnɛːs "snake's". In verbs, the stress plays an important part in the conjugations: Stress is for example never marked in the infinitive, and always occurs on the first syllable. It also denotes the transition from present tense to the preterite, in all aspects: "We say" means kāham ˈkaː.ʔa̤m in Namian, while "We said" is called kahām [ ka.ˈʔa̤ːm]. The stress on all verb conjugations are always regular. If there are two, or more, geminated syllables in one lexeme, the second one's stressed, for example pāraktīra paː.ra.ˈt͡ʃtɪː.ra, which means "torso". Syntactics Considering the fusional nature of the Naṃkrthāvāka, the word order's rather free. It does possess tendencies towards SOV and SVO. It sould however be noted that the word order may alter depending on transitivity. Only SOV, VSO and SVO orders will be presented here. Transıtıve Orders SVO with ergative verbs is rather common, similarly to English. Since focus lies on the patient, the verb phrase often moves further back. Intransitive Orders The intransitive order SV(O) is not very common, but it does occur. Since focus lies on the verb in the Nāmic languages intransitive orders, the VS(O) is much more common. Please note that the pronoun may be dropped, but it is not custom regarding intransitive verbs. Phrases Noun Phrase The Naṃkrthāvāka does not possess particular positions for the adpositional phrase, thus it will be prepositional for the sake of simplicity. It is quite similar to English. Possessive noun phrases can be formed by the means of a possessive pronoun, or a dative construction. Nevertheless, they remain after the noun. Verb Phrase In the Naṃkrthāvāka, adverbial phrases always precede the modified verb. The noun phrase may be freely positioned,or it may depend on transitivity - see further up. Tables! Verb Comparison Declension